Vagrant Memories
by TrainxEve-Fan12
Summary: Forgetting pain is convenient. Remembering it, agonizing.


**A/N: This was based, to some extent, on the story Amalgamate by Reinstated. Check it out! **

**A few warnings. This takes bits and pieces of both of the games and references quotes and actions and other such stuff made by characters without necessarily mentioning which characters say what. Most people, I'm aware, aren't like me and don't have every single line of the games and their speakers memorized. So if you want to, I guess, just ask if you're confused about something.**

**Just visions through a shattered looking glass of our equally shattered heroine.**

They think she can't feel them. But she can, and it hurts.

Play dead. That's what they want anyway, a corpse, but it hurts and it scares her and so she goes away for a little while.

Oh God, it hurts.

* * *

"Hare, I wish to go home. Evidently, I have worn out my welcome."

She almost pities the poor thing as she glances about the room and tries to ignore the smell of their rotting flesh, the sight of their bodies practically ripped apart. Never was she overly fond of the two – the rabbit was unpredictable and the mouse less than charming. Still, she would wish this torture on no one. She would never have expected this level of violent, manic sadism from the Hatter.

She turns away from them, eyes focusing on the machine that is housed inside this room. She watches the contraption grab a child without half of it's head who offers almost no resistence, pulls it inside and while she cannot imagine the things the poor child must be suffering, his shrieks seem to be a good indicator of the pain. And then out comes…

"Oh my God…"

The next time she kills an automaton, she has to stop and retch.

* * *

"How many jolts?"

"No more than she deserves."

She wishes the orderlies would quit discussing her as if she hadn't any feelings. Couldn't hear them. But she can't bring herself to tell them, to scream that she is still alive, still there. To scream that if they hurt her anymore they will force her back into a scary world full of screaming boojums and spiders with doll faces and slithering, slimy ruin and children twisted and broken with wires and nails. Maybe that world is better, maybe it, maybe it, maybe it is, but for now she fears it and begs them with her empty eyes not to hurt her any more, not to send her back to that place just as hellish and cracked as her reality. They ignore her, and suddenly it's painful and burning underneath her skin and she wakes up inside the broken Vale.

* * *

She sees the punch, hears it, falls, all before she feels it, and while it's nothing compared to shock treatments or having demented doctors sticking needles and pins in you, nothing compared to leeches sucking your blood til your head begins to droop or to having screws in your skull, it still hurts. Jack Splatter, it seems, is no weakling. Then she feels the warmth on her face from the broken lamp, hears the screams as if it were just yesterday, only yesterday…

"Get out, Alice, get out!"

"Save yourself!"

"Wake up Lizzie! Lizzie, open the door!"

"The key, Lizzie, unlock the door. You'll burn!"

"Alice!"

And she is incredibly grateful for the chill of the tundra when she wakes up.

* * *

"Is sanity required for the job?" she asks.

"Limited quantity. You're not mad enough to be rejected."

By whom? By which? Not mad enough for this little girl, this poor child with her scarred face and painful smile, to reject her help in rescuing them? How pitiful that Alice, who needs rescuing so much herself, might be looked upon as a savior by these children merely by manner of being not quite so twisted!

Or perhaps, not mad enough for the Dollmaker (so familiar, the man they speak of tugs at her mind, tugs, tugs, and she is sure she knows him and yet she cannot know him because the thought hurts) to reject her "deranged soul?" Neither option she likes, but both she will have to face. Perhaps she can save this child – no. No. She must save herself. These children –

"It's here, you dimwits. Get inside!" the girl is shouting at the others, sounding almost maternal, pulling them into the safety of the house and leaving Alice to fight another broken child.

* * *

"...Claimed I'd stolen his heart! Trifling with his affections! Creepy sod. Touching me... Told Papa to never invite him to tea again!"

Alice pushes it from her mind when she finds the memory hidden inside the little pearl house because she doesn't want to accept the knowledge already breaking through her fragile hold on a reality that was apparently all a lie. The reality that the damn cat – "Different denotes neither bad nor good."— and the Queen – "There is no method to this madness!" – and the Carpenter – "Consider the prospect that you have been misled, Alice!" – and everyone else has been trying to break apart. She can't handle it, can't handle what she has changing and breaking yet again.

"His hand was slimy, Alice; like an eel from the Isis. And his name won't help. Bumby!"

And her reality splinters into a million pieces.

* * *

"Look how small she's become; she's barely there. A vixen in her hidey-hole."

Hardly a vixen, she would dare say as she remembers the asylum – bald, unresponsive, oftentimes violent. Still, the idea of a hidey-hole appeals to her, and when she enters into it she stays for just a few minutes longer than necessary to rest. To relax. To allow her mind to repair itself just a little more with the knowledge that not all of wonderland, not all of her, has been destroyed.

Then she stands up and gets moving.

* * *

Why must everything be painful?

She hunches over, groaning and covering her eyes from the sticky sweet, stinging red steam that washes over her, bites back a screech as she feels her nails become claws and horns grow from her head. The pain is not gone, really, and the logical part of her mind, the sliver that is left, screams in agony and begs for the torture to end, but most of her mind is taken up with the desire to slaughter. Her pulse pounds in her veins, her fingers clench her knife and she almost roars at the cat when he speaks.

"How fine you look when dressed in rage."

* * *

"Doesn't like being touched."

"Who likes it, then?"

Alice almost hits them but doesn't because they're just children, really, and while she's tempted to comfort the little girl in the corner, singing a rhyme and staring listlessly at the wall, the time for her to help others has long past.

* * *

Being so close to dying always triggers something, something that breaks her up inside and with a shriek she is a monster who no longer cares about how much she hurts, only cares for slaughter, and the red of their blood in so pretty against this grey-white background.

Sometimes, when she wakes up in the orphanage at night wracked with nightmares of killings, she likes to walk from room to room, bed to bed, and make sure she has not really murdered anyone.

* * *

"You and this Red Queen cannot both survive. You are two halves of the same—" And then he screams and his head is gone and she is on the ground crying because everyone is dead and –

* * *

The Dollmaker's hand wraps around her and it's disgusting because these hands hurt Lizzy, they touched Lizzy, and now they are touching her. When she is released, she would vomit except there is no time to stop now, no time to stop fighting and killing and there are no hidey holes to crawl into. She cannot hide, she cannot escape, she cannot run away from him the way she has from her memories, her broken mind. She must fight, she must save herself and make up for all those that she should have saved.

She is done running.

* * *

"You have used and abused me! But you will not destroy me!"

Finally she has spat it out, finally she has said the words out loud that frightened her so, frightened her in that if she made the words real the weight of them might crush her there and then. But saying them gives her strength to stride forward and snatch the key and –

* * *

Somehow, killing within her Wonderland causes her more guilt than killing this demented doctor.

* * *

"Ah, Alice, we can't go home again. No surprise, really. Only a very few find the way; and most of them don't recognize it when they do. Delusions, too, die hard."

She can survive, she thinks as she walks from the train station and observes the world around her, beautiful in its comfortingly familiar chaos, in this sort of Reality. She can thrive, even. No longer will she have to climb deep into her mind and abandon the outside world to see her friends. Perhaps she has finally found a balance between the two worlds she inhabits.

"Only the savage regard endurance of pain as a measure of worth."

Or, she is too far gone now to ever be properly saved, but she doesn't even consider that.

"Forgetting pain is convenient. Remembering it, agonizing. But recovering the truth is worth the suffering. And our Wonderland, though damaged, is safe in memory... for now."


End file.
